Inside the Shadow
by Atwubis14
Summary: Ages have passed since a very confused Mono awoke on a stone altar and followed Agro to the top of Dormin's temple with a very strange horned child in her arms. He has since grown and decided to uncover the mysteries of the land he grew up in.
1. The Calm Before the Storm

The image is from .jp/. I really like the artist and wish to get official permission, but, unfortunately, the site is in Japanese and I can't translate it. If anyone can help me contact the artist (because I love their work), I would be forever grateful. Thank You for reading my fanfic. I hope you enjoyed it. Please consider leaving a review. Thanks!

I woke up on a day like any other not aware of the revelations to come. I walked over to the small pool of water sister Mono had built from rocks that she had found lying around. I splashed the cool water in my face to get my eyes to finally open. Looking at my dim reflection in the water, I realized that my horns had grown bigger. Of course they grew everyday, like my hair and my height, but for some reason, today, they stood out. Not thinking much of it, I put my stone knife and old torch in my sac, tied it to my waist, and made my way through the woods.

It was still early and the fog and the dappled light that came through made it hard to see where exactly I was headed. The woods had been our home for a long time, and its peacefulness was my favourite part about it. Nothing ever seemed to happen in these woods. There was never a chirp loud enough to notice,not a scamper too quick to put you on edge. The silence was almost sacred, and my breath was the only thing interrupting it. I walked closer to a depression in the ground and , sure enough, plunged into the puddle that had formed inside it with a loud splash. I felt disappointed. The woods were now full of sound. The splash echoed, the squirrels scampered to the top of their trees, the birds all started fluttering, and I heard a very familiar limping clop.

Agro slowly made his way over to the puddle where I had so unceremoniously fallen. He nudged me softly with his graying snout then snorted with relief when he discovered that I was still okay. Using his large neck as support, I pulled myself out of the murky puddle. My clothes were a mess and I knew sister Mono would be disappointed. As I started to walk, I noticed a sharp pain on my right thigh. I saw blood and realized that the top half of my knife's blade had broken off and was stuck in me.

Quickly pulling it out and bandaging my thigh with an old rag, I came to the conclusion that the knife could not be repaired. I performed a reluctant inventory check and saw that all my personal belongings were ruined. The torch was soaked and obviously couldn't be lit again. My food was covered in mud and didn't look very appetizing. And most importantly, my paper, which sister Mono had painstakingly made for me along with the burnt wood pencil were completely destroyed. Agro sniffed my bag and gave a disappointed and soft nicker. "Sister Mono is going to kill me isn't she, Agro?" I joked to him. In response, he nuzzled me reassuringly, as if he was saying that I'll be fine. "I guess we'll just have to wait for her to come back," I replied.

We headed back to the shack that sister Mono had built when I was still young. I remember watching her drag the trees she had fell with her stone axe, and then putting them in four holes she had made to serve as the corners of our home. She then mixed the branches that she had stripped the trees of with mud to make the walls. For some reason, she always knew what had to be done. She was the one who taught me to recognize which fruit were edible and how to cut a lizard's tail in a way that would let the lizard live and give us food. She told me to apologize to each lizard for the unimaginable pain I was causing it. I understood from the screams of the lizard how much it must actually hurt and thanked each one for letting us do this. Eventually we started to grow the fruit with the seeds and had enough near our house to feed us for ages and lizard tail was only eaten for special occasions.

Agro limped forward and stopped to examine something on the ground. It was a squirrel that had fallen from the treetops to its death. He picked it up by its tail and brought it over to our house. "We shouldn't keep it Agro," I whispered to him, afraid of breaking the silence again. He snorted and put it next to our fireplace anyway. "Do you know where sister Mono went this time?" I asked. He sat down and snorted irritatedly. "So you're getting tired of her leaving without telling, too," I said as I made my way over to him and sat down next to him. "She always comes back with something good, though," I joked in her defense. "Last time, she brought fish and the paper, didn't she?" Agro snorted again. Because, there wasn't much left to do now that I couldn't gather any food, explore, or draw until my belongings dried, I leaned on Agro and looked up at the ever sunny, yet, cloudy sky.

I couldn't make out much from beyond the canopy, but I knew exactly how it looked. The sky never changed. Sister Mono had told me that where she was from, the sky would go dark, the sun would go down, and the moon would come and take the place of the sun. She described little dots in the sky called stars and said that she would spend her nights trying to find a pattern in them. The concept seemed bizarre to me. Here we only had the light behind the clouds. Once, when I wandered away from the woods, I saw a couple of pillars of light, though I couldn't tell whether the light went from the ground to the sky or from the sky to the ground. I made a promise to myself to go see them one day.


	2. When The Wind Picks Up

I awoke to the soft snore of Agro. I looked at his forehead, where there was once a sharp, white slash, and noticed his fur had really started to turn gray. All I could see now was a gray oval. He had been with us since when I was a baby. He used to take care of me when I learned how to walk and wouldn't let me leave until I had eaten all of my food. I remember when I was really small and he used to bend over so I could get on him. Although I was nowhere near _his_ towering head, I was now taller than sister Mono. She had told me that where she came from they had a regular cycle of seasons, and each turn was called a year. According to her, I was around fifteen years old which coincided with the number of circular depressions on my horns, so I believed her despite how strange the concept sounded.

The leaves on the ground crunched under my feet as I tried to get up without disturbing Agro's slumber. I picked up my, now dry, torch and put the rest of my items in my bag and headed off once again. My plan was to run over to the closest pillar of light and figure out what was actually happening. I sneaked away from Agro knowing that as soon as he noticed me missing, he would frantically try to find me. However, I planned to be back before he would wake up. All I wanted to do was see the pillar of light.

Sister Mono had never taken me to any of the pillars and had always made a point to circle around them. I would think to ask her about them every time but the crease on her brow and the worry in her eyes told me that I would not get the answer I wanted if I simply asked. She would probably come up with a fake explanation for them, the same way she said that the reason there isn't a night here is because this is where the sun "lives" and the reason she doesn't have horns because she is a girl. And she would say it with a smile so fake and condescending that I would get angry.

That truly was my only problem with both Agro and sister Mono. Neither of them believed I was capable of anything more than carrying things for them. I wanted to prove that I could do useful things. I wanted to go with sister Mono when she left on her hunts to go find supplies or special things without telling. I wanted Agro to stop treating me like a little kid and worrying about where I was all the time. I was capable of doing things on my own. The last time that we went to the sea, sister Mono was having a hard time with a school of fish and dropped our fishing net into the water. I got up and dived off from our raft to fetch it for her. When I surfaced, all I got was a scolding about the dangers of the sea and I was banned from getting on the raft again until I had proved that I was responsible enough to fish with her. Then, she dropped me off at the shore and told me to take our haul back to our house.

As I was leaving, I decided to stop off at the nearby shrine. It was made of solid slabs of limestone, a stone that was found only by the shore of the sea. I marveled at how the shrine was built, because I couldn't think of a way that the stones could have been moved easily. Yet still, the unrelenting woods had taken over the shrine and it was now covered in leaves and grass. I kneeled at the front and clasped my hands together, the way I had seen sister Mono do every time she was leaving. "Please let things go my way," I whispered to the shrine. As if in response, a cool wind blew through the woods and ruffled my hair. I smiled and ran to the edge of the woods.

Author's note

PM me if you can read Japanese and are willing to help me get permission to use the image of Wander from this website ( k - sara . skr .jp/ (remove all spaces in the link)). Also, leave a review whether you liked it or not. Thanks for reading!


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